Harris Reed’s Debut Demi-Couture Collection Continues His Message of Fluidity and Grace

The favorite designer of Harry Styles weighs in on fluid fashion and his first collection after graduation from Central Saint Martins.

Harris Reed’s Debut Demi-Couture Collection Continues His Message of Fluidity and Grace

It’s been a whirlwind winter for Harris Reed, the young American designer in London—although it’s also been something of a whirlwind life. Introduced to stylist Harry Lambert while still a student at Central Saint Martins, Reed met Lambert’s client Harry Styles backstage at a concert and quickly began producing custom outfits for the star. Reed’s work continued to blow up, with blouse capsule collections, a boot collaboration with Roker, and a just-launched MAC collection of colorful palettes. 

To the world at large, Reed is still probably best known as the designer who put Harry Styles in a dress. That is an act so normal within fashion and yet so sensationalized in the mainstream media that Reed has been subjected to trolling and hateful remarks online. While upsetting, it hasn’t phased him—today, he presents his first full collection of six demi-couture looks. “Having people maybe have an issue with the way that I express myself, you know, it constantly fuels my creative think tank,” Reed says. “I want everyone out there to feel like they can be their truest selves, and for me as a designer, that means I’m pushing the quote, unquote ‘extreme’ so far in one direction so that we can all find ourselves in the middle. What I want to do is bring the Harris Reed fluid world into the biggest kind of mainstream space in the most artistic way.”

The pieces are all handmade by Reed and his team using both new and upcycled textiles. The mash-up between masculine, Savile Row tailoring and feminine tulle that has played out in his student work continues, pumped up to even bolder silhouettes. One look, with an ombré orange tulle mermaid skirt that fans out in front, reveals trouser legs and suiting behind its mille-feuille layers. Another drapes crimson fabric with black twill across the chest and off the shoulder, translating a traditionally debutante neckline into a statement-making shape. The final look, a white wedding dress that is sure to spark dozens of custom bridal requests, is made from a repurposed wedding dress that Reed found in a charity shop. The bodice was remade into high waist trousers and a tulle skirt was engineered to arch over the shoulder with a small hole for the wearer’s arm to peek through. That piece alone took the team two weeks to perfect.

Because of COVID-19, Reed could only use a single model to show off his demi-couture. “I really wanted to put the clothes on a man’s body, someone with male features, and really play up the feminine silhouettes to such an extreme to say that this message is here to stay,” Reed says of why he chose Momo Ndiayen. “These clothes are here to prove a point. This is not about selling you something on the rack. This is about hopefully trying to change the way that we think about things and see things. I’m not trying to be controversial. I’m just trying to do what feels like the right thing for me.”

This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Steff Yotka